Crowning B.C. sports hall glory for King Kwong

Larry Kwong, now 90, the first Asian player in the NHL, shows off his old Trail Smoke Eaters jersey. Kwong was inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2013.Steve Bosch
/ PNG

Then-New York Rangers head coach Frank Boucher shakes the hand of Larry Kwong, circa 1948. Kwong was the first National Hockey League player of Asian heritage, playing one shift for the New York Rangers during a March 13, 1948 game in Montreal against the Canadiens. He also played for the New York Rovers (1946-1947) and the Braves of Valleyfield, Que. (1948-1955).

Larry Kwong, a left-winger for the Valleyfield Braves in Quebec (1948-1955), was the first National Hockey League player of Asian heritage, playing one shift for the New York Rangers during a March 13, 1948 game in Montreal against the Canadiens. He also played for the New York Rovers (1946-1947).

Vernon-born Larry Kwong, the first Asian-Canadian to play in the NHL in 1948 (guided to centre ice by his caretaker, Fina), acknowledges a lengthy ovation from the capacity crowd at the Wesbild Centre after being recognized by the BCHL's Vernon Vipers and the Society of Hockey Historians and Registrars.

Larry Kwong was the first National Hockey League player of Asian heritage, playing one shift for the New York Rangers during a March 13, 1948 game in Montreal against the Canadiens. He also played for the New York Rovers (1946-1947) and the Braves of Valleyfield, Que. (1948-1955).

Larry Kwong was the first National Hockey League player of Asian heritage, playing one shift for the New York Rangers during a March 13, 1948 game in Montreal against the Canadiens. He also played for the New York Rovers (1946-1947) and the Braves of Valleyfield, Que. (1948-1955).

Larry Kwong, a left-winger for the Valleyfield Braves (1948-1955), was the first National Hockey League player of Asian heritage, playing one shift for the New York Rangers during a March 13, 1948 game in Montreal against the Canadiens. He also played for the New York Rovers (1946-1947).

Larry Kwong, now 90, the first Asian player in the NHL, shows off his old Trail Smoke Eaters jersey. Kwong was inducted into the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame on Thursday, Sept. 19, 2013.Steve Bosch
/ PNG

VANCOUVER — His groundbreaking hockey achievement lasted barely a New York minute, which probably helps explain, in part, why Larry Kwong’s terrific hockey career went unappreciated for so long.

But over the last few years, the story of the now 90-year-old Chinese-Canadian out of Vernon, who broke the National Hockey League’s colour barrier in 1948 with his one and only shift for the Rangers 10 years before celebrated black player Willie O’Ree took to the ice with the Boston Bruins, has belatedly found an audience.

A Calgary resident since 1972, Kwong was honoured in 2008 by the Flames during a game in the Saddledome and by the junior Vernon Vipers of the B.C. Hockey League. The B.C. Hockey Hall of Fame created a special award for Kwong in 2010, and he was added to the Okanagan Sports Hall of Fame in the athlete category in 2011, the same year he received feature treatment in a 2011 CBC documentary Lost Years: A People’s Struggle for Justice.

The accolades reached a new level Thursday night when Kwong was formally inducted in the B.C. Sports Hall of Fame in the pioneer category.

“Oh absolutely, it’s the biggest (honour) by far,” says Chad Soon, a Vernon school teacher and hockey historian who has been hugely instrumental in pushing Kwong’s story and who first nominated him to the Sports Hall of Fame in 2010.

“Just a ton of relief,” added Soon about hearing in January that Kwong had finally been elected in his third year of eligibility. “I know he’s honoured. We’ve become pretty good friends and I speak to him almost every week.

“I knew he had to get in, but the question was, was he going to be here (to see it). He is 90 years old.”

Kwong’s story is one of an improbable dream and dogged perseverance, of discrimination and racism, of avenues blocked and adventures sought.

His father, drawn by the promise of gold mine riches, came to Canada from China in the 1880s, but wound up farming and then operating a grocery store, Kwong Hing Lung (Abundant Prosperity). Larry, christened Eng Kai Geong at his birth in 1923, was the second youngest of 15 children. He took the surname of the store after his father died when he was five.

He and his brothers skated on frozen-over area ponds or the flooded empty lot beside the store. But it wasn’t an easy upbringing. Under the Chinese Immigration Act, passed two weeks after he was born, Chinese-Canadians were denied voting and other basic rights.

He remembers a barber refusing to cut his hair simply because he was Chinese.

The hockey rink, though, proved to be a refuge, even if his mom thought the game was too rough. He convinced her to let him keep playing by promising her he would build her a house with money earned playing the game.

Larry won provincial midget and juvenile titles with the Vernon Hydrophones, then joined the senior Trail Smoke Eaters in 1941, two years after that storied team had won the world championship.

“Exceptional around the net, exceptional,” George Dobie, a Hydrophones teammate told Soon a few years ago.

“He could put it up in that top corner better than they do in the NHL now. His hands were quick. His skating was perfect. They couldn’t touch him.”

Many of the Trail players also worked good paying jobs at the Cominco smelter, but Kwong was excluded because of his ethnicity and wound up working as a hotel bellhop. He said it made him feel like he wasn’t “one of the boys. It sticks with you.”

In 1942, the Chicago Blackhawks invited him to training camp.

“I was doing flips,” he remembers. “That’s what I wanted.”

But the Canadian government refused to process the documentation needed to leave the country.

He didn’t protest.

He has always faced rejection and racism the same way, in relative silence.

Chinese-Canadians, he says, were raised not to speak out, “just be seen and not heard.”

After single seasons in Nanaimo, where he was lured by the opportunity to make good money working as a shipyard labourer, and Vancouver, he was drafted into the army and did basic training in Red Deer, Alta. While there, he played on teams that were used “to entertain the troops.”

After playing the 1945-46 season back in Trail, he was signed by the Rangers to play for their minor-league team, the New York Rovers. Before a home game with the Rovers, the 5-foot-6, 145-pound Kwong, nicknamed King Kwong by the New York media, was feted at centre ice by the unofficial mayor of New York’s Chinatown and two showgirls from the China Doll nightclub.

Late in the 1947-48 season, a campaign in which he collected 33 goals and 86 points in 65 games for the Rovers, Kwong was called up by the injury-plagued Rangers for a March 13 game against the Canadiens at the Montreal Forum.

“It is what I had dreamed about since I was a boy, to play in the NHL.”

He sat on the bench, however, for the first two periods and got only the one shift in the third period. Still, his appearance made headlines across Canada.

But the dynamic skater and clever little forward never played another shift in the NHL.

He remains disappointed he didn’t get a real chance to prove himself. There was some thought that giving him an NHL shift was just a publicity stunt, but Kwong also understood his circumstances.

The NHL was only a six-team league at the time with 14-man rosters. Hundreds of talented minor leaguers never got a shot.

After the 1947-48 season, Kwong quit the Rangers organization to sign with the Valleyfield Braves of the highly regarded Quebec Senior Hockey League. He starred with that team for seven seasons, playing for legendary coach Toe Blake and playing against the likes of future NHL greats Jean Beliveau, Dickie Moore and Jacques Plante.

Kwong was named league MVP in 1951 when the Braves also won the Canadian senior championship.

By the late 1950s, Kwong had moved overseas to play briefly in England.

He later played and coached in Switzerland, where he also became a tennis pro before returning to Canada in 1972 to help his brother run a grocery store.

Both of his wives died of cancer and Kwong has had his own health problems. Both of his legs were amputated below the knee several years ago because of circulation problems related to diabetes.

But he remains active, using prosthetic legs and a wheelchair to get around.

Soon, who while living in Toronto had befriended longtime black minor-league star Herb Carnegie and worked with him on hockey diversity programs, says his grandfather recalls following Kwong’s progress in the news in the late ’40s and ’50s and taking heart in his achievements. “He was a real hero to the Chinese community, having made it into the mainstream of Canadian society,” says Soon. “He was one of the very first B.C.-born and raised players and the first from the Okanagan to play in the NHL.”

That moment was ever so fleeting and Kwong’s story fell into obscurity for decades. But now the modest gentleman who paved the way for Asian hockey players like Paul Kariya and Brandon Yip is finally being recognized as a true pioneer.

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Crowning B.C. sports hall glory for King Kwong

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